African swine fever (ASF) was first discovered in Kenya in 1910 and arrived in Europe in 1960, where it remained for over thirty years. The virus entered via a flight from Angola to Portugal. Leftover catering from that plane, already infected with ASF, was used to feed Portuguese pigs, starting the epidemic on the continent. And also in our country. This caused serious economic damage to a sector that was already important in those distant decades. Eradication of the virus was long and slow, until in 1994 Spain was finally declared free of ASF. But from then until the virus's return to Collserola just a few days ago, the pig farming sector has never been free of the disease. In between, there was another one: classical swine fever (CSF).

It's raining on already soaked ground for the Catalan livestock sector. Barely two months after the First cases of contagious nodular dermatosis that put cattle farms throughout Catalonia on alertAn outbreak of African swine fever in the wildlife of Collserola has triggered alarms, now on the country's pig farms. Pig farming is the main activity in the sector, with almost 8 million head of livestock and more than 5,000 farms, ranging from large-scale operations to small and medium-sized producers, especially in Lleida, Central Catalonia, Garrotxa, and Selva. This economic engine, beyond the farms themselves, employs thousands of workers, from feed production to marketing, including transportation, machinery manufacturing, slaughterhouses, and meat processing plants. On the first working Monday after the outbreak, the volume of work in the sector remains relatively normal, but the atmosphere is tense due to fear and uncertainty about how the disease will evolve. Within a 20 km radius of the outbreak, where there are about thirty small farms, the movement of pigs in and out is restricted. Outside the restricted radius, but very close to the border, Oriol Rovira Costa, from Lluçanès, has a piglet farm with 300 sows that produce about 8,000 pigs a year: "We don't know what will happen. We understand that if we used to export 20% within Spain and now we can't," he explains. The official statement from the slaughterhouses is that no significant changes are expected in the slaughter forecasts this week, although local producers claim that their first orders were canceled today. "We hope that the government and the large companies that dominate the market will restructure so that the supply chain can continue. On the farms, I have batches every 15 days: I can't tell the sows not to breed when I inseminated them 100 days ago," Rovira adds.

The Spanish government is negotiating at all levels to "limit as much as possible" the economic impact of African swine fever, confirmed after two cases were detected—with four more cases pending validation—in two wild boars in Collserola. ASF is a disease caused by a virus that has no effect on human health—neither through contact nor consumption of meat—but is highly contagious between wild boar and pigs, with mortality rates approaching 100%. For this reason, some countries are very protectionist regarding imports from countries where this disease has reappeared. Specifically, the Minister of Agriculture, Luis Planas, has stated that 20 countries have, so far, blocked the purchase of Spanish pork products.

The Catalan government confirmed on Friday two positive cases of African swine fever (ASF) in two wild boars found dead this week in the municipality of Cerdanyola del Vallès (Vallès Occidental), and has therefore activated its contingency plan against the disease, according to a statement from the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food. The plan's measures include an immediate ban on pork exports outside the EU. These two cases are currently the only ones found in Spain, so there is no evidence that the disease is affecting any farms in Catalonia. "So far, no outbreaks have been detected in domestic animals in Catalonia," the Ministry of Agriculture stated in a press release. However, at a press conference, the Catalan Minister of Agriculture, Òscar Ordeig, stated that there is a "high" probability of new cases being found in Catalonia. The last case detected in the state was in 1994.

In 2022, American surgeons successfully transplanted a genetically edited pig's heart into a man, who survived for approximately two months. In 2024, also in the United States, the same procedure was performed on a kidney, also extending the life of a 62-year-old man by two months. And the same year, Chinese doctors grafted a transgenic pig liver into a brain-dead person as part of a clinical trial. Now, researchers at Guangzhou Medical University (China) have taken a further step towards advancing interspecies transplants (xenotransplants): they have managed to graft a laboratory-modified pig lung into a human that was functional for a period of nine days. The team of Chinese thoracic surgeon Jianxing He and the Chinese company Clonorgan Biotechnology led the research, published this Monday in the journal Nature Medicine.